Foursquare's other app, Swarm, wants to help you remember everywhere you've been

In the spring of 2014, Foursquare removed the
location check-in aspect of its app and spun it into
a separate app called Swarm. The idea was simple: take the
impulse people have to check-in where they go and amplify
that to create a location-based social network.

After focusing solely on check-ins at first, Foursquare gamified
Swarm in August 2015 with virtual coin upgrades, a check-in
leaderboard, and goofy stickers.

With a new update on
Thursday, Swarm is focusing on what it's
discovered people really care about using the app for:
logging where they've been.

Meet the new Swarm.Foursquare

Swarm 4.0, a free update on iPhone and Android, is all about what
the company refers to as "life logging." Most of the app's game
mechanics, like the leader board and mayorships, are still
there. But there's a new emphasis on visualizing the app's
data that shows where you've been.

"One of the main motivators for people checking in is that they
want to keep track of all the places that they've
been," Foursquare's head of product, J Crowley, told
Tech Insider during a recent interview at the
company's headquarters in New York. "We have all this data, we've
just never done a very good job of presenting that to people."

Swarm's updated profile tab breaks down all of your check-ins,
from restaurants to stores, into visual categories. From there
you can drill down into the specific kinds of places you most
frequently visit along with the Swarm users you check-in with the
most.

There's a new map view and search feature for either a bird's eye
or city-specific view of where you've been. So if you're taking a
trip to Portland and want to see where you've been there before,
you can quickly do so.
Thanks to Foursquare's impressive Pilgrim technology, Swarm
also guesses where you've been without checking in and lets you
confirm check-ins retroactively.

"You may not always remember to pull your phone out of your
pocket," Crowley said. "So we want to make that easier for you."
In a future update Swarm will let you privately check in, but for
now all of your check-ins are visible to friends you've added in
the app.

Swarm's main feed shows you friends' check-ins. You can
message people and send stickers.Foursquare

Swarm is trying to better leverage its knowledge of where your
friends are going as well. A "Weekly Swarm" will be sent once a
week to each user with summary of all the interesting
places their friends have checked in, whether it be
traveling to exotic cities or visiting trending restaurants.

"People typically download Swarm because of the game," Crowley,
who has personally logged over 5,000 Swarm check-ins, said.
"That's what hooks them originally. But then life logging starts
to kick in as you start to check in more and you start to see
these insights on the post check-in screen. That's really the
long term strategy."

Once you feed Swarm enough check-ins, it's ability
to create an easily digestible summary of where
you've been is quite compelling. An added benefit for users of
Foursquare's main app is that Swarm check-ins inform Foursquare's
restaurant recommendations to make them more personalized to your
tastes.

Foursquare won't say how many people use Swarm, but usage is at
an all time high with over 8 million check-ins recently logged in
one day. Crowley and his team are betting that, with the right
combination of sticky game mechanics and helpful location data,
Swarm will continue to grow.

"Life logging is this really interesting habit," he said. "Once
you get into it, it's hard to break."